Exits
from Homelessness for Trauma and Abuse Survivors

By Mary
Coleman, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Physical, sexual and emotional abuses
are commonplace among the homeless. Even when shelter can be found,
traumatized consumers of public shelters need help to recover from trauma and
acquire skills to place them in the world of work. Not only must their trauma
be treated but skills must be enhanced in alignment with their basic
aspirations for citizenship and human dignity. Feelings of isolation,
disaffection, suspiciousness, and paranoia are common presentations. Homeless
social service providers and teachers must be trained to recognize the near-and
long-term effects of trauma on the homeless. Integrated social service efforts
are required to treat the whole person and to integrate best practices in the
treatment of trauma and abuse into program interventions. Elected leaders,
homelessness advocates, social service providers, colleges and universities,
the homeless, and philanthropic organizations must have conversations about the
conditions under which this nation will affirm opportunity for the homeless.
Erasing poverty and caring well for those who are poor, homeless, and have
experienced toxic violence, trauma and abuse are matters we must face squarely
as a nation.

The Nature of Trauma and Abuse

The role of service providers would be complex enough
if consumers of housing only presented with a need for shelter and an incident
of trauma or abuse. Unfortunately, more than two-thirds present with both
childhood and adult trauma—feelings of victimization are real and such feelings
contribute to depression and the devaluation of lives. Abuses that occur in
childhood induce shame and often are manifested in deviant practices in the
victimized. Trust becomes a life-long issue and no place seems safe. The
streets, parks and back alleys are also dangerous—uncertainty lurks. Looking
for safety is at the root of the challenge. Where are safety and protection
from abuse, insult, injury and trauma found?

These are some of the
very same questions that sharecroppers asked just over seven decades ago. Like
most sharecroppers, the homeless lack sovereignty in their homes. In the
sharecropper shanties there was constant vulnerability to sexual abuse,
psychological trauma and marginalized citizenship. Like many of the homeless,
sharecroppers lacked access to health care and they and their children were
exposed to illiteracy and inopportunity. There the similarities end. Even
though they worked from early morning until dawn; they still lacked financial
resources and access to safe shelter, and protection from illiteracy, abuse and
trauma. Unlike the homeless, as a class, the sharecroppers’ cheap labor helped
produce the wealth of a region if not the wealth of the nation. In the
sharecropping era, mothers of single headed households, moved from plantation
to plantation to find a safe place for their sons and daughters—their infants,
toddlers, and teens. They were running away from lawlessness and trauma toward
citizenship and healing.

Contemporary homelessness seems a bit more
random. Veterans, the elderly, children, female and male adults, and whole
families are at risk. Many of today’s homeless are also seeking equal
protection from unlawful acts—acts of rape, neglect and abuse as well as
post-traumatic stress from war, and civil strife. And all too often among the
homeless, abuse and neglect originate in the home. Distancing oneself from kin
is hard to do even when kin have perpetuated the abuses. It is particularly
hard when no one believes that the abuse actually occurred and that it has
occurred repetitively over the span of one’s childhood. The answer then as now
is a place protected by law. The homeless need equal protection.

Just as the poor rural sharecropper needed equal protection to recover from
peasantry, the homeless need both access to safety and restoration of the
skills needed to practice meaningful citizenship. In this case, they need an
integrated network of support capable of co-leading and monitoring their
restoration to functional citizenship and stabilization. Like the sharecropper,
the homeless have been victimized. Most are not helpless victims without
aspirations and the will to distance themselves from past neglect, lawlessness,
abuse and trauma. Most seek to restore their mental and physical health.

At a basic level, shelters and housing programs more generally must
provide integrated social services and must continue to do so even when
families are permanently placed. This is not currently how this sector operates
and this situation cries out for practice and policy transformations. Handing a
housing voucher over to a traumatized war veteran or to a child who has
suffered chronic sexual or other abuse is to ignore the trauma and abuse. This
approach perpetuates a cycle of abuse and trauma and of gains and relapses.
Social service agencies must be adaptive in much the same way that victims of
abuse and trauma must learn adaptive skills. How can social service providers
help the traumatized homeless cope with life in an adaptive but healthy manner?
Service providers become part of people’s lives at a very vulnerable time and
severing this partnership too soon, relegating the partnership to a mere
official role, or delegating it to others in the social network without proper
follow-on, --are recipes for another disappointment, especially for emancipated
minors, without any anchors or life-vests in their hands or hard-wired into
their memories.

Building Stronger Pathways to
Protection and Recovery

We need to apply these basic
principles of recovery--- ensuring trust in the service provider network,
developing and/or restoring a sense of agency and worth in clients, and
nurturing healthy, adaptive practices---in the processes of case in-take, case
analysis, temporary shelter living, and permanent shelter. Such a program needs
development. Children who experience homelessness do not drop out of life. Many
homeless parents attempt to keep their children in school. When trauma and
abuse are both in evidence, the ability to cope with school as a member of a
community is a challenge and an opportunity. What care must be taken to remove
triggers and make school and shelters more hospitable to children and their
parents? Social service providers and teachers must be advocates in advance for
clients/consumers. Colleges and universities must train prospective early
childhood, elementary, middle school, secondary, and special education teachers
in a manner consistent with the affirmation of opportunity and equal protection
for homeless children. Teachers and social service workers need a fair amount
of psychotherapeutic training. At the very least both need to be sensitive to
trauma and abuse and not participate in the re-victimization of people. Trauma
education or wellness approaches need to be a formal part of training that
staff and teachers undergo. Maxine Harris, Ellen Bassuk and others refer to
this environment as not merely trauma–knowledgeable but trauma-informed
(Harris, M. and Fallot, R. 2001; Harris, 2004; and Hopper, E., Bassuk, E., and
Oliver, 2010).

This is a paradigm shift and its implementation and
performance require evaluation and assessment. This shift is needed as more
and more homeless people—children and adults--experience toxic stress, which
can lead to trauma (Shonkoff, 2000). Without protective relationships children
and adults who have experienced toxic stress/trauma lose their capacity to
adapt and function well. Importantly, roughly 15 to 30 percent of all adult
women are themselves victims of abuse and trauma. Not only must social
service providers and teachers be trauma-informed, housing programs must be
trauma-informed at the level of placement and monitoring (Hopper, E., Bassuk,
E., and Olivet, J., 2010). The continuum of housing services is impressive:
Group homes with and without staff, shared apartments, single apartments,
transitional apartments, and single family homes, are on the continuum. A
network of providers is needed to insure that the homeless can exercise housing
options and feel safe and protected as they do so. What kind of group
intervention for homeless trauma survivors is available and what actually
works?

Toward Meaningful Next-Generation Programs and
Assessment

Next-Generation Programs

Today’s network providers routinely participate in a
self-assessment process where questions are raised that could be used to
maximize exits from homelessness for the chronically abused and traumatized.
Six areas/domains might usefully constitute an actionable self-assessment: (1)
service providers’ knowledge of the nature of trauma and abuse experienced by
the homeless; (2) availability of housing options and integrated treatment
programs for homeless families with histories of toxic abuse and trauma; (3)
the curriculum and experiential learning of teachers of homeless children with
trauma and abuse, and roles of teacher education programs in preparing teachers
of homeless children; (4) the adaptability of adults and children in the
pathway from shelters, abuse and trauma to permanent placement and recovery and
reintegration; (5) the pace and quality of social services offered to the
homeless; and (6) repeaters in the cycle of homelessness, trauma and abuse.

AN INTENTIONAL ROLE FOR COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES

For just over a century Lesley University has
pioneered in the area of teacher education and human services (www.Lelsey.edu/
Centennial: 1909-2009). Last year Lesley University developed the Child
Homelessness in Massachusetts Initiative. The Initiative engages
students, faculty and social service agencies in a conversation about best
practices in ameliorating child homelessness and creates a series of
experiential learning opportunities for prospective teachers, applied
therapies, psychology, biology, child studies, and human services majors.
Faculty in psychology, holistic psychology, expressive therapies and social
work have been especially active in placing students and teaching courses that
give students an intentional awareness of the literature on trauma and abuse,
transformational program regimes in integrated treatment of homeless adults and
children. The internship office at Lesley University has worked with social
service agencies, foundations, and other organizations to create experiential
learning opportunities for students in all majors. Applied real-world learning
is a goal at Lesley. As in previous years, over the next five years these
students will be placed in the network of providers and will have an
opportunity to learn first-hand the conditions under which group intervention
works, or does not work; the roles of service providers in deciding which
housing arrangements are best for which clients; the relationship between
direct child services providers and social service homeless providers. Their
journals and observations will be shared in-house with mentor evaluators and
mined for their heuristic value and next-generation best practices. Annually,
they will share with the University community the artifacts of their work,
depicted in a variety of forms ranging from art to traditional poster sessions
and capstones.

In phase two of the Lesley Child Homelessness
Initiative we want to build more intentionally a wellness curriculum within
holistic psychology, expressive therapies and human services that draws upon
the work of Al Pesso. Founded five decades ago, the Pesso Boyden System
Psychomotor (PBSP) is a mind and body therapy. In the next year Lesley
University would like to produce a mind and body wellness track (or certificate
program) within the above mentioned majors. This wellness track will blend PBSP
and Reiki therapies. Students will have access to a track within a branch of
majors as well as the possibility of earning a certificate in wellness. This
curriculum and the varied partnerships it will spawn will enable Lesley
undergraduate students to enter the field of human and social services already
equipped with the knowledge, tools and sensibilities to lead in this sphere.

Synthesis

At the end of the third
and fourth years of bachelor’s study students and faculty evaluators, and
service network providers, could usefully synthesize their experiences and
point to explicit policy advocacy areas as well as to ways of strengthening
college and university curricula. A faculty study team could, in collaboration
with network providers, lead a multi-year study on stabilization and use their
work to inform best and next generation policies and practices in protecting
the homeless and restoring their psycho-social and civic assets.